Last week I was sent the third part of this three-part series on addiction treatment centers in Florida and California, and specifically how they are almost entirely unregulated.
This is completely absurd, and it goes to show just how far behind the medical community is in dealing with addiction the way it should be dealt with — as a disease with physical causes that will respond to physical treatments. Where science and medicine have not set boundaries, snake-oil salesmen and quacks will move in. And the fact that there are so many different varieties of snake oil for sale, and such a lucrative living to be made in buying and selling addiction patients (read the section on kickbacks) — all of that is proof of the size of the problem.
These “rehab centers” that promise to cure addiction by letting their patients ride horses and watch movies are not fulfilling the needs of the community. But they are pretending to fill those needs. Obviously, “communing with nature” is not an effective cure for addiction; if it was, addiction would be long gone, since nature has been around much longer than addiction has. But by thriving on such empty promises, these treatment centers are showing us just how many people are desperate enough to throw away thousands of dollars and years of their lives if they think it will get them a step closer to overcoming their addiction.
Right now, this industry is lawless and wild, unregulated and uncontrolled by the powers that have been put in place to protect the interests of patients and consumers. Naturally, in such an environment, the patients and consumers are taken advantage of. While this would happen in any industry, in medicine it is much worse, since people taken in by these programs are not just robbed of their money and time, but are also sick, and untreated will only get sicker. This kind of deregulation, that breeds fraud, is a crime against addicted patients on a massive scale.
This would be easy to fix; we just need the same sort of regulatory mechanisms that exist in every other field of healthcare. We need to broaden federal anti-fraud laws that already encompass Medicare and Medicaid. This is not a new problem, and it does not require incredible, innovative solutions; just basic compassion and common sense.
But since we’ve gone this long without doing it, I’m not confident in seeing it done anytime soon.